


Sugar This Up

by voleuse



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-09-03
Updated: 2007-09-03
Packaged: 2017-10-04 03:48:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voleuse/pseuds/voleuse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>There are no words and not one word erases my earth.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Sugar This Up

**Author's Note:**

> Set after S3. Title, summary, and headings adapted from Suheir Hammad's _nother man dead_.

**1\. Tish**   
_2 years before me attica was auschwitz is algeria_

Martha's always spent the most time on the phone with Tish. Before the year that wasn't, however, their conversations were pragmatic. How to convince Leo of something, or how to mitigate another of their parents' arguments. What shoes Martha should buy, or what job Tish should go for.

Now, they spend minutes and hours in chatter, observing the weather or the street or the titles of the magazines at the shop on the corner.

And every night, Martha stays on the line until Tish can't stay awake any longer. They'll watch television while on the phone, keeping each other company in absentia. The conversation dwindles until two or three in the morning.

Martha wakes every morning exhausted, and takes a nap every afternoon, before dinner. It's a little ridiculous, she knows, the way they coddle each other, but she can't help it.

And her nightmares aren't anywhere near as bad as the ones Tish has.

**2\. Clive**   
_no beauty no comfort for nature for me_

Sometimes Annalise comes around, for no reason except to wheedle at Dad. It's silly, Martha thinks, because Dad's always embarrassed, and Mum always glares like death.

She wishes one of them could tell Annalise to go away, but it's a nice bit of normalcy. And afterwards, Mum snipes at Dad for an hour or so, and he grumbles back and it's like nothing's happened aside from reconciliation.

Martha wonders if Mum knows about the punching bag Dad keeps in the garage. He doesn't hit it, she's pretty sure. But once, when she was visiting after breakfast, she snuck up on him.

He was just sitting, _looking_ at it. Martha watched his fists curl and uncurl, curl and uncurl.

When his shoulders started to shake, she backed away from the door. She didn't say a word.

**3\. Leo**   
_time not mine living through borrowed clocks_

Leo's left out of it all, the family's shifting undertones, the way they look and look away from the rest of the world.

He wasn't there. He hadn't been through any of what they had, even if he did remember it.

Over dinner, Martha watches as his eyes skitter over their faces. It'd be easy to pretend it's just because he'd rather watch the baby--they all would, when it comes down to it. But that's not all.

He believes them. He wants them to be crazy, but he believes them. He's said so, a drink in his hand in the dead of night, and he cried on her shoulder because nothing they said made sense anymore. They'd spent so many nights crying on his shoulder.

When Leo asks Martha to pass the rolls over, she grabs his hand and squeezes it. He smiles, and she knows he means it.

But when she releases his hand, his smile dies away.

**4\. Francine**   
_color these words with a palette more lady like less blood_

Mum writes.

Martha's told her, several times, that she can never show her journals to anybody.

Mum has to write, though, her fingers twitching around a pen when she isn't typing into her PDA.

Truth be told, Martha would be happier if Mum erased every bit of what she wrote. Burnt her papers, took a magnet to her disks.

The day will come, Martha knows, when the isolation becomes too much. When Mum has to tell somebody, everybody, even if they laugh.

The day will come, and Martha hopes she'll ready to stop her. And she hopes Mum will forgive her when she does.

**5\. Martha**   
_fill mouths with angels' breath to make forget_

She passes her exams. (Mum buys her three new sets of scrubs, and Tish organizes the celebration.) She keeps a mobile phone at the bottom of her purse, and it never rings.

She does a round in surgery, and meets a pediatrician named Tom.

She runs into strangers every day, and she remembers them as friends. She's bolder, her mates tell her, and her smile's something different.

Martha lives every day in one direction, patching wounds for a single species (as far as she knows). She tells people she's happy, but she's happiest of all when she doesn't have to remember.


End file.
